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MANASSEH's JERUSALEM. C. 690-640 B.C. in 701-And Perhaps

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MANASSEH's JERUSALEM. C. 690-640 B.C. in 701-And Perhaps 303 MANASSEH'S JERUSALEM. C. 690-640 B.C. IN 701-and perhaps again, as we have seen,1 about 690- J erusalem experienced a sudden and wonderful deliverance from the arms of Assyria. So impressive an attestation of Divine favour was not without its preparations, political, religious and moral. Under Uzziah (c. 783-740) the City had greatly increased in size, in wealth and in strength. In 721 Samaria, her only political rival in Israel, was destroyed. For more than a century the influence of her Temple had steadily, though slowly, grown at the inevitable expense of other shrines in Judah. And we have been able to follow the traces of a gradual elevation in the moral sense of her community.2 The meaning of these events and tendencies was first fully articulated by Isaiah.3 Jerusalem was not "everything to Isaiah"; but he was sent to read to her people her previous discipline, to display her as the hinge of God's present providence with the world, and, under conditions, as the capital of His abiding Kingdom. While scourging the vices of her population under Uzziah and Jotham, Isaiah declared that God had trained Jerusalem to be The City of Righteousness. The Temple was the vesti­ bule of His Palace and Presence. ~ion was His hearth : a refuge which He had founded for the remnant of His people. To all this history and its prophetic interpretation the Deliverance of Jerusalem came as God's own signature. We are too prone to consider the great event by itself, and to trace to it alone the subsequent prestige of the City. Apart from that previous history and prophecy the Deliver­ ance would have been as a seal without a document to it. 1 ExPOSITOR, September, 1905. 2 Id., April and May, 1905. 3 Id., July, 1905. 304 MANASSEH'S JERUSALEM. In estimating the effect of all three upon the destiny of Jerusalem, we must distinguish the various qualities of imagination and conscience, which they roused, among her mixed and fickle people. Of such qualities there were at least three; the conscience of the executive statesmen, the popular imagination, and the more spiritual convictions of the prophets themselves. As to the first, we find explicit statements in the Second Book of Kings. The Deuteronomic editor of that book attributes to King Hezekiah a number of religious reforms, some of which are sympathetic with, while others were actually required by, the earlier teaching of the great prophet.1 Hezekiah (we are told) brake in pieces the bronze serpent, which Moses had made.for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it, and it was called NelJ,ushtan. There can be no doubt about the fact bf this particular reform, and we may safely assume that it implies the removal, or at least the attempt to remove, all the idolatries against which Isaiah had inveighed. Isaiah's indictment of the idols and the sacred trees had been so absolute, that it is hard to believe that Hezekiah postponed their abolition to so late a date in his reign as after 701. But the accept­ ance which has been granted to the record of this reform has been denied to the clause which precedes it--he removed the high places and brake the pillars and cut down the Asheroth 2-on the grounds, that the grammatical form of the clause is late, that there is no evidence of Isaiah's hos­ tility to the three objects which it mentions and that they were still in use at the beginning of Josiah's reign. The question is difficult, and an answer perhaps not now attain­ able. But, because the Book of Deuteronomy, which contains explicit laws against the high places, the pillars and the Asher6th, is certainly compiled from earlier sources, l 1 Kings xviii. 4. 2 Plural, after·the LXX. MANASSEH'S JERUSALEM. 305 and because such written laws were (as we have seen in other cases) probably the result of specific acts of reform, it is quite possible that Hezekiah instituted measures for the abolition of all three institutions of the earlier religion of Israel. That his reforms were of a drastic character,1 is proved by the violence of the reaction against them under Manasseh. Nor is it a conclusive objection to the intro­ duction of these particulars in the list of Hezekiah' s reforms, that Isaiah does not enforce them by name. In such a movement there are al ways some details achieved, which its spiritual leaders have not actually defined in their state­ ment of its principles. We have seen the faint beginnings of a tendency towards the centralization of the worship of Judah nearly a century before Isaiah.2 And, indeed, so pure a faith as he urged upon his people involved such a centralization as one of its most practical consequences. To us it may seem paradoxical that the doctrine of the One God should carry as its corollary the doctrine of the One Sanctuary ; neither in this mountain nor in Jemsalem shall ye worship the Father: the hour now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth. But in the religious circumstances of that time there was indeed no greater safeguard for monotheism than by con­ fining the national worship to the Temple. The rural shrines of Jahweh had previously been shrines of local gods, and in their ritual, as in their worshippers' conceptions of the godhead, must have perpetuated the influences of the ancient polytheism. In name belonging to Jahweh, in reality they were devoted to the Baalim-according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, 0 Judah.3 The worship 1 "Die erste Durchfiihrung der Forderungen des Jahvismus "; "eine vollige Durchfiihrung des Jahvismus in seiner streng monotheistischen Bedeutung mit teilweiser Beseitigung anderer Kulte," Winckler, KAT, .Brd ed., p. 271 ; cf. Guthe, Gesch. p. 223. 2 ExrosITOR1 April, 1905. 3 Jer. xi.13. VOL. XII. 20 30G MANASSEH'S JERUSALEM. of one J ahweh, spiritual and non-idolatrous, was possible only in the Temple. Again, the rural sanctuaries had all been violated by the Assyrian invasion of 701; and further, the smallness of the Israelite territory since the collapse of the Northern Kingdom in 721 and the exile of its people, rendered practicable the periodical assembly at Jerusalem of all the worshippers of J ahweh. Even, therefore, if - Hezekiah did not actually succeed in centralizing the national cult in the capital, there is no reason to doubt that he inaugurated such a policy. The political and religious motives to it were all present before the end of his reign. It need not have been started at the same time as the measures for removing the idols. Centralization may have first suggested itself when the latter movement was found to be impossible so long as the rural sanctuaries remained ; and it was, no doubt, greatly facilitated by the overthrow of these sanctuaries in 701, and by the vindication of the unique inviolableness of Jerusalem. The removal of the high places by Hezekiah is therefore more probable after than before that date. Of the effect of the Deliverance of Jerusalem on the . popular imagination we can have no doubt. For a century . Assyria had been the fear of the peoples of Palestine. The citizens of Jerusalem had heard Isaiah himself describe, in periods which marched like their subject, the progress of the monstrous hosts of the North: their unbroken ranks, their pitiless and irresistible advance. Further ana further south this had pressed, overwhelming Northern Israel, spreading around Judah, and rising over the land to the very walls of Jerusalem. From these her citizens at last saw with their own eyes the predicted and long-imagined forms of their terror, knowing that behind them lay exile and destructiorr for the people of God. Then suddenly the Assyrian army vanished and Jerusalem was left the one unviolated fortress on the long, ruin-strewn path of the llfANASSEII'S JERUSALEM. 307 conqueror. We need not wait for answers to the difficult questions of the date and value of the Scriptures which celebrate the Deliverance. The bare facts, about which there is no doubt, attest their own effects in the temper of the Jewish people. Upon minds too coarse to appreciate Isaiah's reading of the moral vocation and destiny of their City, her signal relief (or reliefs) from so invincible a foe, must have made a profound impression. The Jews had seen the rest of the sacred territory violated, and a great proportion of its population carried into exile. Here alone the foe had been kept back. Alone the Temple remained secure. From this time, therefore, rose the belief, which we find seventy years later hardened into a dogma, that Jerusalem was inviolable. No article of religion could have been more popular. Among the mass of the citizens, undoubtedly increased by the devastation of the rest of the country, it must have spread with rapidity; and the measures for centralizing the national worship in the Temple, in so far as they were successful, can only have assisted its propagation. But we must not suppose that such a belief was wholly accepted by the more spiritual of the prophets. Micah had predicted that $ion should be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem become heaps, and the mountain of the House as the high places of a jungle.1 And although Isaiah had fore­ told the Deliverance, and almost unaided had sustained the courage of Jerusalem till it came, he did not, we may be, sure, believe in the survival of the City apart from those, moral conditions which the popular faith in her inviolable­ ness was certain to ignore, but upon which it had been the constant energy of his long career to insist.
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